Literature – Paola Trimarco

And then two Schiaparelli’s come along at the same time

I discovered Ernesto Schiaparelli and Elsa Schiaparelli within the space of a couple of days. I resist linking them by their shared surname – as Ernesto and Elsa S – because they weren’t husband or wife, nor siblings for that matter.

During a recent city break in Turin, we visited the highly acclaimed Egyptian Museum, said to house more Egyptian artifacts than any other museum in Europe. Spread across four floors of daily and ceremonial objects, wall paintings, jewellery and of course, mummies and their tombs, it left me buzzing with fascination and curiosity. Yet, at one point, I found myself wondering who had taken all this stuff in the first place. The short answer appeared to be Ernesto Schiaparelli – though he did have fellow Egyptologists and archaeologists working alongside him.

This Schiaparelli led twelve major archaeological expeditions in Egypt between 1903 and 1920. A few grainy black and white photos of the man himself were on display alongside maps showing where different excavations took place. Looking at these images, I was struck by the man’s pride – his puffed chest, the self‑assurance. That was when the guilt sunk in. I glanced at the packs of Italian school children huddled around the mummies’ tombs and assumed none of them were thinking about repatriation or even long‑term loans back to Egypt. But later my thinking shifted when I learned that the Egyptian government of the time had granted permission for all these digs, which were funded by King Vittorio Emanuele III – a familiar name to anyone who has toured northern Italy. And it’s not like Egypt lacks its own treasures – the new and rather ostentatious Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza holds over 100,000 artifacts.

Back at our Turin holiday rental, lounging between outings, I stumbled across a review in La Repubblica of an exhibition at London’s Vicotria and Albert Museum on the works of designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Born in Italy in 1890, this Schiaparelli came to fame after moving to Paris and starting her own fashion house in 1927 – a year before Ernesto died. The shapes and patterns of her designs were surreal and mischievous, with themes ranging from insects and food to human organs. In her time, Schiaparelli’s clothes were one‑of‑a‑kind and highly sought after. Her artistry was recognised widely, and she collaborated with Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Picasso, among others.

Finally getting to see this exhibition – there was a 5-week waiting list – I was mesmerised by the aesthetics and by the idea that people once wore these works of art. I could trace her influence across the decades that followed and understand why she was chosen to create costumes for the glamorous early days of Hollywood and international cinema.

These two Schiaparelli’s came from the same Italian aristocratic family. Ernesto was Elsa’s great uncle. There is no known record — no letters, no memoir references, no photographs, no interviews — suggesting that Ernesto Schiaparelli and Elsa Schiaparelli ever met. Yet in my imagination they meet in a third space: a consciousness‑space where curiosity and creativity reign, and where each nods to their shared ancestry.

What I’ve been reading

I’ve become a Rachel Cusk fan in recent years, and Parade, did not disappoint. To say that it’s a ‘story of’ four artists whose lives overlap places this uncomfortably in the familiar rubric of a novel, when the narration regularly breaks the conventions of that genre. Perhaps novels have become too filmic – and this is one novel that couldn’t possibly be made into a film. At times it reads like an essay composed of conversations in single rooms, the sort of scenes that would repel contemporary film editors and their audiences. And the piecing together of its disparate parts only works on the page. For instance, each of the artists is called G. The first G is male and decides mid-career to start painting upside down. As another G is female, a typical reader starts to wonder if it is the same G who has transitioned – exactly the type of game Cusk plays with her readers. As confusing as it sounds, it works. The four lives separately, and at more subtle levels collectively, explore themes on identity, the nature and value of art and the meaning of freedom. Anything more I could say at this point would be a spoiler – not for revealing the plot, but for denying you, dear reader, the chance to experience it firsthand.

Final thought: I was reading Parade around the time I visited the Schiaparelli exhibition at the V&A. I might not have been aware of it then, but I don’t doubt that in my subconscious, these fictional artists were speaking with Elsa in that same consciousness‑space.

Bunny’s Vignettes – First instalment

I’m working on a story, which I’ve realised needs to be novella length – in other words, nearly impossible to publish. In the spirit of Charles Dickens and Walter Scott, I thought I’d publish this in monthly instalments (yes, UK English is one L). As each vignette is published in this blog, it is also added to one of my webpages: https://trimarcoblog.com/bunnys-vignettes/

Most of the stories take place in the 60s and 70s, reflecting my own childhood in America. This first instalment is something of a preface.

Kitschmas Memories – 2012

As children we had those bubbles with a snowy scene inside. You would shake them, and glitter would fall like snow on the quaint plastic towns. They were just small enough to fit into one hand. But not this one. This takes two hands. The bubble is circular and looks more like a clairvoyant’s crystal ball than a child’s toy. This is one of those pricey gifts for grownups which infantizes them.

Every December I place it on a corner of a windowsill partially covered by a curtain. It’s there for a passing glance. To gaze at it for too long makes me morose.

The scene is of downtown Chicago with its famous buildings cramped together as if on the same city block, which of course, they are not. The Chicago River snakes along a couple of metal bridges crossing the turquoise painted waterway. One of the bridges has a tiny commuter train on it. If I examine it with my reading glasses, I can just make out the Chicago Transit Authority logo.

When you lift this glass globe with its heavy ceramic base and flip it over, there’s a wind-up key. A couple of good turns and the music box tingles with ‘My Kind of Town.’

This adult toy was a present from my sister from whom I have been estranged for over twelve years. She always sent her siblings interesting and expensive Christmas gifts. Receiving them made me smile no matter how frivolous they were. I would think in those moments that she’s not so bad after all.

Sometimes I wonder if her Chicago-themed Christmas presents were her way of making me nostalgic for the city I left over 30 years ago. Were the Chicago Cubs porcelain coasters, Chicago silver bells and a stuffed lion from the Art Institute of Chicago all about trying to make me regret having left? This reasoning only works if we remembered our childhood in the same way.

Or was she flaunting her money, reminding me of the wealth she married into? She’s always been competitive that way. Whereas such things mean nothing to me.

I don’t miss receiving these gifts from her. And I don’t know why I take the snow bubble out of its box every year.

But I do. This toy that isn’t really a toy.

The snow bubble is like a baby’s head, about the size of my sister’s head when she was a baby, and I was five.

I shake the snow bubble hard. It doesn’t scream like she did.

The little glitter flakes slowly descend on uncertain memories.

###

When ‘What If’ Novels Become True

Has it really only been a year? The headlines have piled up so quickly they’ve blurred into a single, exhausting smear – a year of presidential mandates and postings that veer from absurd to cruel, each one landing like another stone in the rucksack I’ve been dragging behind me. I’m not going to list the imbecilic, inhumane and illegal decrees of the current US president, who was inaugurated a year ago today – plenty of news services have done that. Reading them, I realised that so much has happened my brain had already forgotten about or diminished the importance of some of it. I don’t think this is just because of their high number or the fact that some have withered on the vine – what’s happened to the dangers of Tylenol/paracetamol? It’s also due to the anger and despair I’ve experienced with each new story over the past 12 months. Coping with these emotions has entailed living more in the moment – being aware of daily life and grateful for my retirement – and consequently relegated to the past events that I cannot change nor work around.

At times, I have been reminded of What-If novels that imagine a world where some aspect of history happened differently. Philip Roth’s Plot Against America has come to mind too often. Roth offers us an alternative 1940s America in which the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh – in real life a hardcore isolationist and Nazi sympathizer – becomes president after beating FDR in his third election. President Lindbergh signs non‑interference pacts with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Lindbergh’s administration promotes antisemitism, creating policies that tear apart Jewish communities and families under the guise of ‘Americanization.’ I’m left with an uncanny feeling of fiction bleeding into reality – the comparisons between Roth’s quasi-fantasy world and our own don’t need to be enumerated.

Playing with the notion of a What-If novel, I’ve come up with one of my own:

It’s 2026. President Kamala Harris sits in an Oval Office devoid of goldleaf. In place of the aggressive ICE raids from the past decade, a quieter and more technology-driven ‘humane enforcement’ approach is now being used for immigration. However, all is not perfect – this approach faulters when a historic climate-driven migration surge hits the US southern border. In the meantime, Fox News airs a series of videos exposing Harris as having a clandestine affair with a high-ranking CIA official. Amid accusations of exposing official secrets and being branded a slut, Harris claims her innocence. On the world stage, while skirmishes continue in Donetsk, Russia has otherwise retreated. Ukrainian elections have started without Zelensky, who has returned to acting and being the voice of Ukrainian Paddington Bear. Gaza has begun rebuilding despite continued threats from Israeli armed forces, but these have quelled in the light of the Netanyahu trials taking place in the Hague. The ‘Greenland Purchase’ is a joke of the past.

What I’ve been reading

It probably has not helped my mental health these past few weeks of infamy to be reading a post-apocalyptic novel. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. Set in the Great Lakes region of Canada and America (countries no longer have governments or borders), it has several storylines and follows different principal characters living in a world where some 90% of the population died during a pandemic. The writing is a masterclass of narrative construction as storylines move seamlessly back and forward in time, linking the time before the pandemic to the post-apocalyptic society struggling without internet, electricity, medical services, etc. While this sounds grim – and there certainly are sad moments – I found pleasure in the telling of the story, the relationships among the characters and one set of characters in particular – despite all, a group of musicians and actors travel together to different ‘settlements’ performing Shakespeare.

Another novel that is sad on the surface, but still enjoyable to read has been Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City, translated into English by Howard Curtis (a friend who passed this book on to me). Set in the late 60s in Rome, the story follows the life of Leo, intelligent and witty, but an alcoholic drifter who struggles to hold down jobs. He manages to eat and have a roof over his head thanks to well-off friends, emersed in a Dolce Vita existence of partying and casual sex. But for Leo, under an aura of loneliness and melancholy. Then he meets Ariana. They have an intense romance soaked in alcohol and bonhomie. He’s in love, but she isn’t, and his life spirals down yet again. Still, a gratifying read.

These days, my reading is an act of escape without being escapist – my way of stepping sideways out of the world – not to avoid it, but to breathe long enough to step back in.

Today’s Inbox – or WTF is happening to America?

Still surfacing from a deep night’s sleep, I checked my inbox to find an email from the US Social Security Administration. The subject header read: ‘Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors.’ That woke me up quickly.

This is an agency of the US government that used to communicate, like other government agencies, in dry non-partisan language. It gets worse in the body of the email:

‘The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation’s economy. “This is a historic step forward for America’s seniors,” said Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano. “For nearly 90 years, Social Security has been a cornerstone of economic security for older Americans. By significantly reducing the tax burden on benefits, this legislation reaffirms President Trump’s promise to protect Social Security and helps ensure that seniors can better enjoy the retirement they’ve earned.”’

Since when do civil servants (as we call them in the UK) publicly praise the policies of any president or prime minister? Worse still – to allude to political campaign promises? Short answer – when that civil servant is Frank Bisignano, former CEO of Fiserv (a payment processing enterprise), a staunch Republican and one of the richest people in America. Tr*mp appointed him Commissioner of the SSA soon after retaking office in January of this year (yes, it’s not even 6 months yet).

This being from the SSA, the email got away with not mentioning how America’s most vulnerable would have their financial support lacerated. Medicaid in under another government agency: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). I’m waiting for their email to all US citizens and suspect I’m going to have a long wait.

The next email I opened also had a thing or two to say about the One Big Beautiful Bill – I hate even writing in this hyperbolic language. But it’s clever to use the propagandist parlance in legislation so that, like it or not, we all start sounding like MAGA morons.

From Robert Reich:

‘It is a disgrace. It takes more than $1 trillion out of Medicaid — leaving about 12 million Americans without insurance by 2034 — and slashes Food Stamps, to give a giant tax cut to wealthy Americans. It establishes an anti-immigrant police state in America, replete with a standing army of ICE agents and a gulag of detention facilities that transform ICE into the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the government.’

Reich continues by recounting how moderate Republicans were bullied by the president’s threats and insults, mostly via X and Truth Social.

I retreated from my emails and opened the Le Monde app. One of their top stories covered OBBB – they’ve avoided both the English language and the embarrassing phrase by abbreviating it. They’ve also taken a more objective tone and have expressed all the above – it’s a bill that reduces taxes on the better-off, funds anti-immigration policing and leaves America’s most needy worse off, and that the US president attacked members of his own party to get it passed. Even the purring beauty of the French language doesn’t help to make this more palatable.

What I’ve been reading

Helen Dunmore’s award-winning novel A Spell of Winter has provided the perfect escape from the horrors of American politics. Firstly, the story starts far away from modern America in England soon before the first World War and continues to a few years after the war. Cathy and Rob are siblings living with their grandfather and a servant in an old manor house. The children had been abandoned by their mother and witnessed their father’s declining health in a mental sanitorium. The children grow into teenagers, and their co-dependent relationship becomes incestual and later deadly. The story explores the power of class, of loss and of family. Secondly, the articulateness and sensitivity of the writing made this often disturbing and sad tale – some call it gothic – a delight to read. A snippet from Dunmore’s book: “The past was not something we could live in, because it had nothing to do with life. It was something we lugged about, as heavy as a sack of rotting apples.”

Quite different from the vulgar vernacular and semantic satiation coming out of Washington these days.

Titanic Languages

This is not another linguistic term, nor is it figurative. I literally mean the big cruise ship whose sinking continues to intrigue and entertain over a century later. I’ve been listening to the BBC Sounds podcast Ship of Dreams, which puts the tragic voyage under a microscope, examining everything from the workings and perils of the engine room to what was on the menu for the upper deck passengers. Following an introduction covering the sociocultural and economic background that led to the construction of such a ship and the weeks leading up to Titanic setting sail, the podcast re-enacts the disaster with the help of historians, nautical experts and survivors’ accounts.

Among the fascinating factoids to emerge is information about the languages spoken on the Titanic. After English, the most spoken language was Swedish. Of the 1,300 passengers on board, 123 were Swedish (with 327 British and 306 Americans). Of the 994 crew members, some 34 were Swedish nationals. While these crew members were mostly dining staff who worked the luxury liners with the full expectation of returning to Sweden, all the Swedish passengers were travelling third class and immigrating to America for a better life. The Italians and French, by the way, ran the kitchen.

In this potpourri of languages, Arabic could also be heard on the Titanic, though the exact number of speakers is hard to ascertain, especially given the bilinguals on board and the poor record keeping of the day. Among these Arabic speakers were some 150 Lebanese immigrants who came from rural villages and were fleeing poverty. Sadly, only 29 made it to America. When these survivors arrived in New York, they were given temporary lodgings, food and clothing by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. According to the podcast and other accounts (Encyclopedia Titanica), anyone from that part of the Middle East was categorised and treated as the same by Euro-Americans. It has also been noted that the Hebrew Aid Society was a non-discriminatory humanitarian organisation.

It’s hard not to think about these Swedish and Lebanese immigrants without reflecting on the plight and treatment of immigrants to America today, or the hostilities between Arab nations and Israel. The adage about history repeating misses the mark.

What I’ve been reading

Annie Ernaux may have won the Noble Prize for Literature, but I’m not convinced of the literary merit of her work. By literary I mean work that makes the reader aware of its language and style of presentation. I’ll admit that I grumbled when Bob Dylan – a lyricist, not a poet – won the prize, but now I have to say that his lyrics are far more literary than Ernaux’s prose. To be fair to the French writer, she has often said that she is an author of autofiction and not a novelist. I’ve just finished reading her ‘autofiction,’ Une Femme, about the life and death of her mother. While the story holds some interesting reflections on the lives of women and family dynamics in France from the early twentieth century to the 1980s, the writing was so matter-of-fact that I didn’t come away from it with any satisfaction of having read a work of literature.

The flipside of this was reading Bill Browder’s Red Notice, which doesn’t aim at fiction or literariness. Yet, it read like a thriller with feelings of frustration and pathos that gave it emotional force worthy of any literary writer. Browder, a US citizen, recounts his experience of setting up an investment company in Russia following the end of the Soviet Union when the country was a wild west for investors. His run-ins with corruption and dubious politicians reached its peak with the torture and murder in a Russian prison of Sergei Magnitsky, Browder’s lawyer. Holding people responsible couldn’t happen within Russia, so Browder involved the US government, international human rights organisations and the media. And none of that was easy. Today, Browder is recognised as a human rights activist.

Finally, noting the death of writer Edmund White, I reread his brilliant essay published in Granta in 2008 about his view of Europeans when he was a child in America and his first experience of travelling in Europe years later. So much of what he said then resonated with me (an American who has immigrated to Europe) that I still remembered much of the essay 17 years later. I owe that not only to the content, but to the magic of his prose. RIP.

My 2024 in review without lists

Regular readers know that I’m not a fan of the listacle – those articles that list the best of or worst of or top 10 etc. They’re click bait and often poor examples of writing. By copping out of the type of commentary or critical review that threads an argument, they offer mere snapshots brimming with clichés. With this hanging over my head for what I shouldn’t do, I’m reviewing 2024 under a few categories.

My year as a verbivore

Yes, I used to refer to myself as a logophile, but I’ve decided to use verbivore instead despite Word underlining it in red. This word was coined by the writer Michael Chabon in 2007 when talking about his love of words.

I’m afraid 2024 hasn’t been good year for verbivores thanks largely to the many national elections taking place all over the world and where politicians have overused words, such as woke, to the point that it can mean the opposite of their original meaning – or simply have no meaning at all aside from being something to despise. I’m also somewhat miffed that words like demure and mindful have gained new meanings thanks to the verbal grasping of social media influencers. Both words are being used to mean low-key and subtle in fashion and style.

The OED ranked brain rot as the word of the year, one that I never used even once. Apparently, it has come out of the Instagram/TikTok generation’s feeling after scrolling through dozens of posts. It can also refer to the low-quality content found on the internet that I do my best to avoid – a challenge when trying to find vegetarian recipes on Pinterest and having to skirt around videos of cats stuck in jars.

While I don’t go around recording myself, I’ll bet that my most used word during this year was incredible. In part, I’ve picked this up from the French who frequently use incroyable. When the worst president in US history (according to historians) gets re-elected after doing and saying so many things that individually should have made him unelectable, that’s incredible. On a more positive note, given my first-hand experience dealing with builders, plumbers and electricians in the South of France, I thought it incredible that Notre Dame Cathedral was renovated after the catastrophic fire in just over five years.

My year as a reader

This year has been dominated by two writers as in recent weeks I found myself reading yet another Robert Harris novel, my third this year, and another Amelie Nothomb foray into autofiction, my second for 2024.

After hearing Harris speak about his latest book, Precipice, in Ely a couple of months ago, I delved into this thriller which begins at the onset of WWI. It’s an historical period I’m strangely fond of and the story recounts the true-life affair between Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith and the socialite Venetia Stanley. Asquith’s casualness towards national security is mind-boggling as his teenage-boy infatuation led him to share with Venetia everything from Cabinet debates to classified documents coming from his wartime generals. Though not as complex or informative as Harris’s Pompeii or as intriguing as his Conclave, Precipice is still an entertaining and interesting book.

Taking advantage of the public library in Menton, I’ve just finished Amelie Nothomb’s La Nostalgie Heureuse (avail in English). The narrator’s view on the world is as quirky as ever and expressed with her usual dry wit. In this story, she’s already a well-known writer living in Paris, who returns to Japan to participate in a documentary about her early life. Key to this is an anxiety-provoking reunion with a man she nearly married some twenty years earlier. A noteworthy aside – she (fictional narrator and real-life author) had written about the relationship in one of her earlier books and when the ex-fiancé is asked by the documentary maker how he felt about that book, he said that he enjoyed it as a ‘work of fiction.’ This is when the narrator realises that her truth could be other people’s fiction – a wink to the reader of this autofiction.

Throughout the year, I have also made it a point to read writers that are highly praised in the literary press that I have never read. Earlier in the year it was Paul Auster and Antonio Scurati and in recent weeks Carson McCullers. I finally read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which most people know from the 1968 film. Set in a small town in Georgia during the Great Depression, the story recounts the lives of several characters who are connected by their work and family circumstances. Their sense of isolation is explored against a backdrop of poverty and racism, with a nuanced struggle with homosexuality. The weaving of the stories reminded me of a typical Robert Altman film – very enjoyable despite the grim subject matter.

On the non-fiction side, this year I’ve continued my nerdy interests in bees and trees, trying to find texts for non-specialists that aren’t too scientifically dry or too jokingly flippant. While I’ve also read some excellent biographies and memoirs, the most thought-provoking and impassioned nonfiction I’ve experienced this year has been in the opinion pages of the New York Times, The Observer (UK) and Le Monde. They serve as reminders that despite populist voting trends, humanity still exists.

My year as a writer

I started out this year with two writing goals. One was to return to novel #4 and give it a thorough rewrite. While I didn’t produce a full rewrite, I have rewritten about half of it and have made notes for the other half. This task was interrupted by an avalanche of editing assignments that came my way in October and lasted until December. The other writing goal was to simply send out either one short story or one essay every month. I did manage to send out 12 stories/essays this year, but without the monthly regularity – there were a couple of inactive months and a couple bubbling with creativity. Five rejections have been taken on the chin (three were competitions after all) and I await 7 replies.

In the second half of the year, my writing took on a more therapeutic purpose – maybe my way of dealing with complex PTSD. For the first time I’m writing about unpleasant childhood memories and with the creative process taking over, I’m fictionalising certain characters and subplots. I’ve been experimenting with the ‘I-narrator’ by taking on the role of persons other than myself, trying to revisit these episodes from others’ points of view. I seemed to have tapped into something as the work I’ve shown readers so far has been extremely well-received in ways unusual for my early drafts.

My year as a human

Being a linguist, reader and writer are all a part of being a human, but I am aware too that there are other identities of my humanity, such as a friend, spouse, sibling, neighbour, citizen etc. For me, all these roles fill one stratum of physical living in all its sociocultural and psychological dimensions. In this stratum, 2024 has been about witnessing climate change, and then climate change denial by some and inaction by others, along with the public discourse of hate that substantial portions of the population engage with, making me feel like an outlier. I know I’m not alone in this, but I no longer inhabit a space in the norm range.

Another stratum of my humanity exists, but I grapple to explain even to myself. The word spiritual has been stretched and abused by religious and anti-religious alike to the point that I avoid using it. Perhaps this stratum covers all things incorporeal, including abstract thought. This year has made me more aware of this disembodied beingness, if awareness is all I have for now. And so, I continue to practice mindfulness (in the pre-2024 sense of the word – nothing to do with fashionable clothes).

Thank you, readers, for your comments and emoji reactions over the year. I wish you all peace and joy for 2025.

**Gisele Pelicot, my choice for Person of the Year**

Elections, elections, everywhere

Thanks to President Macron calling a snap election of the French National Assembly, this year, the country of my birth and my two adopted countries, where I hold citizenship in one and residency in the other, are all going to the polls in national elections. In the case of France, Macron will stay president, but his Prime Minister and most ministers in the National Assembly could be from another party. With a power share arrangement like this, we can expect legislative gridlock, more political farce (if nothing else, this election has been entertaining) and what the French do best – protesting in the streets.

The British are less likely to be protesting after this coming election, where it is highly likely Labour will win with a crushing majority. After 14 years of Conservative governments, which drained our social services and gave us the Brexit debacle and four bungling jingoistic Prime Ministers in five years, many citizens of all political colours are going to breathe better knowing that this era of populism is winding down. Whatever the Labour Leader Keir Starmer can achieve or whatever he fails at, his competence and lack of bluster will make him a welcomed change.

I still hold voting rights in the US, where I have not lived in over thirty years. Yet, given America’s place in the world, I believe it’s important to participate in preventing a criminal felon, indicted sexual assailant and fraudster from returning to the White House. I fear that if he keeps to his campaign promises, he will close branches of government which serve to protect democratic processes, repeal environmental legislation (as he did in his first term) and turn America into an international joke – the joke that isn’t funny when it joins other pariah states bent on hatred and war.

A few points of note: 1) France, the place where I spend most of my time, is the place where I cannot vote. 2) I would be able to vote in French local elections if Britain had not left the EU, and it was the travel rights lost to Brexit that made me seek French residency in the first place. In other words, due to Brexit, I have French residency, but due to Brexit, my rights as a resident are restricted. 3) This morning, I dropped into the post box my UK Postal Ballot at the same time as my bowel cancer screening sample.

What I’ve been reading

By sheer coincidence, that is, the lottery of the public library’s reservation system, the last two novels I’ve read were both set in marshes. The international best-seller Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens tells the story of a marsh girl, living in America’s south from the 50s to the 70s. Here the marsh is pivotal to the storyline and the development of themes around the environment and what Edward Said would call ‘othering.’ In Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, the marsh serves as a gentle backdrop for a family story suffused in art, psychology and philosophy. While both novels were engaging with well-crafted plots and characters, reading Cusk’s prose was a deeper, more edifying experience.

Online, I’ve been reading poems by the post-war avant-garde poet Amelia Rosselli, who was trilingual Italian, French and English. Her father and uncle were assassinated by the fascists when she was a child, and her poetry often reflects on the personal impact of fascism and social injustice. This brings me back to this election year and a poem by Rosselli from her collection War Variations with its references to Mussolini and Hitler:

‘The night-wind departed and dreamt grandiose things: I rhymed within my powers and took part in the void. The spinal column of your sins harangued the crowd: the train ground to a halt and it was within its talk that truth paused. In the encounter with the fairytale resided outlaws.’

I’m struck in particular by the line ‘it was within its talk that truth paused.’ Both Mussolini and Hitler were elected to power.

Retiring, doing, being

Not doing anything important or worthy of a salary left me feeling a bit lost at first. For all my years of freelancing and part-time employment, I still had the attitude of a career professional. Even if I was no longer career-minded and shimming up the greasy pole, I had made a connection between earning and doing something purposeful and meaningful to someone aside from myself. Being aware that I felt uncomfortable in my retirement skin and deconstructing the reasons for it has weakened the intensity of these negative thoughts. Awareness is always a first step. I no longer think about not earning and its social link to what is important.

I’m still deconstructing the concept of doing – doing something rather than nothing – doing something purposeful or meaningful (words laden with subjectivity). An article by the science writer Ed Young in the New York Times has put perspective on this. He was writing about his fascination with birds and all his bird-watching activities. He writes, interestingly with bird as a verb:

‘Of course, having the time to bird is an immense privilege. As a freelancer, I have total control over my hours and my ability to get out in the field. “Are you a retiree?” a fellow birder recently asked me. “You’re birding like a retiree.” I laughed, but the comment spoke to the idea that things like birding are what you do when you’re not working, not being productive. I reject that. These recent years have taught me that I’m less when I’m not actively looking after myself, that I have value to my world and my community beyond ceaseless production and that pursuits like birding that foster joy, wonder and connection to place are not sidebars to a fulfilled life but their essence.’

Indeed, some of the things I’ve been doing in my retirement have fostered ‘joy, wonder and connection to place,’ or in my case places – Ely, England and Menton, France. Perhaps doing in retirement connects one more to being.

What I’ve been reading

La Decision by Karin Tuille (available in English) is a novel set in the world of the French judiciary soon after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. It’s a glimpse into the world of terrorism and the law that other books and certainly films rarely jump into with such depth and introspection. Told in two narrative strands it has a first-person narrator, Alma, an examining magistrate, recounting her forensic examination of the life and motivations of a young terrorist suspect at a time when her marriage is falling apart – it too, receives an intense examination. The second strand has the terror suspect being interrogated by a judge, presented in the style of a courtroom transcript. Both strands carry personal and social weight, encouraging the reader to experience a range of emotions along the way.

Pompeii by Mary Beard is a book I heard the author speak about several years ago on the back of her TV series of the same name. This historical account updates what we know about the life in the famous town at the time of the volcanic eruption. Savouring the details of daily life, the coverage might be too precise for some readers, and I confess, at times it made for a good bedtime read. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Beard speak live about Pompeii and again more recently about Roman emperors. What I like about her work is that she spends considerable time looking at the assumptions held by other historians and archaeologists, punching holes in their views and admitting that there still is a lot that we simply do not know. Incidentally, Mary Beard is 69 and is clearly busy doing.

A Renaissance person and a polymath went into a bar…

People say Renaissance man – and my spellcheck has just scolded me for not being ‘inclusive,’ telling me that I should be using ‘person.’ Yet, if you search online for a renaissance person, all you get are Renaissance men. Even worse, if you look up Renaissance woman, images appear of women painted by men of the Renaissance, followed by various articles on the lifestyles of European women who lived during the 15^th and 16^th centuries. No surprise that the online definitions of Renaissance man are steeped in the ideals and sexist language of that time. From Encyclopaedia Britanica:

‘Renaissance man, an ideal that developed in Renaissance Italy from the notion expressed by one of its most-accomplished representatives, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), that “a man can do all things if he will.” The ideal embodied the basic tenets of Renaissance humanism, which considered man the centre of the universe, limitless in his capacities for development, and led to the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible.’

In other definitions these capacities specify physical strength and artistic ability. I wonder if Renaissance man has been replaced by polymath – a fine word though it might lack the gravitas of the Renaissance person. The difference being that a polymath is a person of wide knowledge and learning who’s not required to excel in arts or sports. The word polymath didn’t come along until the early 17^th century at a time of burgeoning sciences and an affinity for Latin and Greek. It’s derived from the Greek polys, meaning many, and mendh, meaning to learn.

What brought me to this subject of humans who excel is different fields was the recent discovery that the 19^th century chemist Sir Humphry Davy was also secretly a prolific poet even though, unknown to most people, only a couple of his poems were published in his lifetime. It turns out his scientific journals were sprinkled with his verse. In the popular press, this idea that a scientist can also be literary seems to come as something of a shock. Is this the result of the specialist world we live in? Or is there some provincial side, a kind of lazy thinking going on? That is, it’s easier to put people into one box than the many boxes most of us inhabit whether we are accomplished or not.

The Observer quotes Sharon Ruston of Lancaster University commenting on Sir Humphry Davy’s journals: “He’s writing about nitrous oxide or galvanism. But then there are lines of poetry as well. These two things are happening simultaneously for him. He is trying to figure out what the world is and how to understand the world.” In this light, it’s not surprising that thoughts about chemistry and poetry were intertwined. So much of the sciences and technologies use the language of metaphors to explain how things work.

Incidentally, a search for women polymaths was more successful than that for Renaissance women. The obvious candidates included the composer, philosopher and abbess Hildegard of Bingen and Florence Nightingale (a statistician as well as a nurse). The not so obvious candidates from the pop-culturally biased world of algorithms were Michelle Obama and Taylor Swift.

What I’ve been reading…

Over the festive season, I read a couple of excellent novels that both revolve around a strong bond between a brother and sister. Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is an entertaining and thoughtful family saga that questions the importance of the homestead and of family possessions. Yuri Herrera’s short novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World, is about a young Mexican woman who crosses the US border to bring her brother back home. While both books are well-written, Herrera’s lyrical style and Dantesque narrative journey left more of an impression.

e.e. cummings at bedtime

Poet Ishion Hutchinson recently described e.e. cummings as ‘a great gateway drug’ to give to a young person who’s disinterested in poetry. Agreed. I discovered cummings (who rebelliously always spelled his name in lowercase) when I was thirteen. Every few years since, I pick up a cummings collection and dip in, soon becoming immersed, amused and sometimes baffled (but enjoying the challenge– dear reader, you know me by now).

Finding myself between novels, I’ve had cummings’s 73 Poems on the bedside table all week. This was the poet’s last collection, published in 1963, a year after his sudden death from a stroke. The poems are all short and make for good bedtime reading, unlike T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ that kept me up and gave me stressful dreams (lesson learned). 73 Poems is an eclectic collection that is hard to sum up – joyous, reflective and yearning are words that come to mind.

Hutchinson explained that cummings is a great gateway drug because ‘he has a sharp ear for the inner music of language.’ This is true. Even the poems that break spacing rules and look odd sliding down a page, when read have rhythm and phrasing that rolls lyrically off the tongue.

What I particularly like about cummings is the way he creates words by working with morphemes or bringing together words into unusual (or nonsensical) collocations. Some examples from 73 Poems, without the line breaks as this blog is already irritating Word’s automated editor:

of all things under our blonder than blondest star…
…these more than eyes restroll and stroll some never deepening beach locked in foreverish time’s tide at poise…
…and (stealing towards the blissful pair) skilfully wafted over themselves this implacable unthing…

Reading these lines again, I feel cummings is winking us.

With cummings at my bedside, I can replace the prayer of my early childhood (the ‘now I lay me down to sleep’) with this version:

Poem 44

Now i lay (with everywhere around)

me (that great dim sound

of rain; and of always and of nowhere) and

what a greatly welcoming darkness –

now i lay me down (in a most steep

more than music) feeling that sunlight is

(life and day are) only loaned; whereas

night is given (night and death and the rain

are given; and given is how beautifully snow)

now i lay me down to dream of (nothing

i or any somebody or you

can begin to begin to imagine)

something that nobody may keep.

now i lay me down to dream of Spring

Good night, dear reader.